Those who pass through the Wicklow Gap these days have been mystified by a gothic and vertiginously castellate film set. Now we know what the set is meant to represent: it is Walt Disney's production of Reign of Fire, a post-apocalyptic tale set in the mountains of Norfolk, East Anglia.
Perhaps you know Norfolk, East Anglia, England? It makes Meath seem like Nepal. Some of it is below sea-level. Much of it is a high tide away from being the North Sea. The highest part rises to your eyebrow, though there is a slight mound which reaches to the giddy height of a camel's hump not far from Yarmouth, and day trippers come with packed lunches to toil up its slopes, there to enjoy the view of a plain which is otherwise as flat as Hungary. And this, the flattest part of England, is being represented by one of the craggiest and loftiest parts of Ireland - and the Norfolk Broads, no doubt, by a brace of big-breasted Wickla girls.
What goes on in the minds of these Hollywood film producers? Is it actual policy to misrepresent real places totally; is it simply an indolent disregard for facts which could be healed by a two-minute consultation with a guide book; or is it some compulsive disorder over which the poor creatures in Hollywood have absolutely no control? If given a film script of Laurence of Arabia, is their first instinct to set it on the deck of an ice-breaker ploughing through the Arctic, with Hugh Grant playing T.E., Richard Gere the American who rescues him, thereby liberating Burma, and Dustin playing the gerbil?
The Quiet Man
When you consider what horrors have been perpetrated when Hollywood has tried to portray Ireland, we should perhaps be grateful it doesn't happen very often. The Quiet Man is as utterly gruesome a misrepresentation of any country that I know of - it was, after all, set at the time when the nearby Letterfrack Industrial School was reaching prodigious heights of brutality and rapine. It prepared the way for further frolicsome grotesqueries such as Finian's Rainbow and Far and Away, and much other such rubbish.
Perhaps the most sinister aspect of The Quiet Man is that it was genuinely adored in an Ireland which must have known it was pure hokum. Nobody in this country in the 1920s, when the story takes place, and the 1950s, when it was made, could have been in any private doubt about the violent reality of life in so many our orphanages, our industrial schools, our Christian Brother-run secondary schools. And when did someone first concoct the mordant observation, "The Sisters of Mercy know no charity, and the Sisters of Charity know no mercy"?
Consensual agents
Of course, the fine details of the institutional brutality of Irish life would not necessarily be known; but no-one was in any doubt whatsoever about the awful fate which awaited those who were taken into - a bitter laugh - "care". The religious of the time who were behaving so appallingly were no more than the consensual agents for the infliction of violence in a society which, by default or otherwise, permitted these deeds to be done. And what helped to inoculate people against these abysmal horrors was the imported imagery of Ireland, courtesy of Hollywood.
These became the valid public representations of Irish life, not the reality they knew in their hearts. Each nun supervising the weeping pregnant teenage girls scrubbing stone floors on their hands and knees for 10 hours a day could daily see with her own eyes. Every Brother lifting a boy up by his ear - all knew the realities of discipline, authority and often cruel submission. Nor were these nuns and brothers parachuted in from an evil island where they had been specially trained in the dark arts of physical abuse and psychological sadism. They were home-grown, home-trained, and home-tolerated by a full democracy which democratically assented to all their deeds.
So we might - and do - mock at Americans getting our history and our geography wrong. But nobody made us accept their verdant myths about Ireland: we embraced those lies just in the same way we embraced the John Hinde postcards of touched-up photographs of donkeys beside stone walls, and laughing children beneath Connemara's wildly fanciful Mediterranean skies. This visual fantasy coexisted with a real world in which local farmers would cheerfully hunt the bogs around Letterfrack, looking for any hapless urchin who had escaped from the industrial school, upon whose wretched scalp there might well be a £5 bounty from the Brothers.
Natural order
Ireland out-Dickensed Dickens for the first 40 years of its sovereignty; not even Dotheboys Hall matches Irish industrial schools a century later, and no newspaper would have dared tell the truth about them, nor would any State censor have allowed a book about them. The entire country - the political establishment, journalists, teachers, the religious, the medical profession - all tolerated these abominations in silence, in part because they thought nothing could be done, in part because these monstrosities seemed to belong to some natural order.
It was no more an Irish natural order than it is for Norfolk to be represented by Wicklow. Indeed that filmic fiction is a very model of topographical exactitude compared to the lies we once intoned about ourselves. As the dark horrors of the past unfold, we might remember this: just everybody knew of those horrors, and did nothing. All in all, we might have made a splendid Nazi state.